Some perspective. Everybody take a deep breath. "They're just appliances," as willoughby said, not insults about your mother! This is re: jscout's comment about CC being more like a commercial range, but applies to the whole thread in general. I have not used a commercial range, but I've read posts by people who comment that they heat EXTREMELY well but can't simmer well at ALL. I imagine anything that has higher total BTUs will have a higher simmer as well, and in that sense, CC IS more like a commercial range than BS, though it is capable of a very credible simmer, at least from the videos I've seen (when adjusted properly). And like a commercial range, it requires more care at simmer than the BS. Needless to say, it sounds like CC owners who still get a rolling boil on simmer should have their burner adjusted, since it is clearly capable of better. But even at its best, CC burners will never keep things at slightly over body temperature (212F is boiling, so 112F isn't cooking, it's not even keeping warm very well!). I don't know if I will EVER need to do that, so I'm getting a CC (also, the 60" CC range will fit a full sheet 18 x 26" pan). For those who truly need to do that often, clearly BS is right for you. And for those who have either BS or CC, STOP FIGHTING! You BOTH have AWESOME gas cooking appliances and the BS vs CC arguments amount to splitting hairs. Incidentally, reintroducing your tasting spoon into the pot and then keeping it lukewarm for too long (yes, I'm talking to you BS 112F simmerers) will speed spoiling, as lukewarm temperatures promote bacterial growth. So pristine infection control is even more important at well-below boil simmer. David

Posted by allykay I've looked at a couple of YouTube videos done by a cooking school chef comparing Wolf and Viking burners with Capital (Culinarian) burners, and a similar one for Blue Star. These are marketing videos done by Trevor Lawson of Eurostoves. He sells Capital Culinarian and used to sell Bluestar. The bottom line is that the placement, number and angles of the holes in the burners make both the Blue Star and Capital burners distribute heat much more evenly across the bottom of the pan than on Wolf and Viking burners. Heat distribution needs to be considered in the context of actual cooking. There are several factors that influence how effectively heat is transferred to your food. No one burner is the the most effective in heat transfer in all situations. Even CC and BS are very different in this way. The CC burner in the video is 5 inches across and has inner rings. This would provide fairly even heat across the bottom of a 6 inch pan. If you use a 12 inch pan though it would create a hot spot in the middle of the pan. You would need something wider to provide the most even heat. In this case a ring burner, open, that has a little wider spread of the heat might be "more even". Some ranges, like BS have burners are different sizes to accommodate the difference in pan sizes. None of this matters too much though if you buy pans that are made of adequate thicknesses of heat conductive metals like aluminum(good) or copper(better). Pans made of steel, cast iron or stainless steel are poor conductors of heat and require matching the pan to the size of the flame. Multiply cookware is an attempt to add some of the heat conductive properties of aluminum and copper to stainless. These are hard to evaluate because the amounts of heat conductive metals used are proprietary. The performance of the pan is blunted by the encasing stainless, but they do often go in the dishwasher. If you have a copper pan of adequate thickness, not only will your heat be even across the bottom but up the sides as well. Aluminum pans are much cheaper and are very even as well. If you cook with cast iron or steel, or even multiply cookware, you might want burners that have various sizes. It will also matter what you are cooking. A pan of chicken broth will allow movement of the fluid and transfer of heat away from the bottom of the pan much more than a pot of thick mashed potatoes. Posted by deeageaux If anything the new gas Wolf models are worse. They used to be 16k btu with that tiny inner burner. Now they are 15k btu without that tiny inner burner. The previous Wolf burner was also semi open. Functionally they are about the same. To me the sealed burner is a little easier to clean. The newer burner still has two burners(stacked) too, but the idea is that the heat on the simmer is spread out a little more avoiding the little circle of heat dissed on the Eurostove video. For anyone looking at ranges, try to see the range in person, live if possible. If you can't do that comments on this forum by actual owners can also be helpful if they contain pros and cons.

I have cooked on standard and pro-style gas, electric coil, electric smooth top and now induction. This, over a 50-plus year span as an adult, and I'm a good cook. I personally feel that when cooking, one should generally pick up a pan, and not schlep it around on the range. To move food around in the pan, use a utensil, not scraping and shaking the pan on the cooking surface (TV cooks looking cool doing such, plus flipping food, etc. notwithstanding). With minimal care, your induction cooking surface will remain looking good! I clean up with Dawn on a cloth or sponge, rinse using same, and dry with a microfiber cloth. This takes care of food spills, water marks and grease splatters. Special cleaners not required... my experience.

The comments about ten-power settings got me musing on the subject and about Amy's initial question about logarithmic power controls. Here's where that lead me. Nobody really has logarithmic power controls, but there can be power settings spaced to sort of approximate a logarithmic curve -- a number of settings at the low end with only a couple of additional points needed to define the steep side of the curve for really high heat. In theory, that can be done with a ten-step power curve and some folks do find 10 power settings fine for what and how they cook. Others do not. Is anybody else here old enough to remember the GE stoves and cooktops from 50's and 60's with ten mechanical pushbuttons for heat settings? Those pushbuttons were literally "digital" controls, meaning that you punched them with one of your digits. GE sold a lot of them for a couple of decades, so some people found them adequate. Some did not. For the current digital electronic ten-step controls, others here besides loonlakecamp have reported satisfaction with a ten step set-up. Others, like me, would find them inconvenient for my cooking with, say, my pressure cookers. With only ten heat level steps, I would have to be constantly switching settings to maintain the correct pressure. Power setting "1" might be too low, setting "2" might be too high. Switch to 1 for a while until the pressure drops a little too low, switch to 2 for a while until it gets a little too high, then back to 1, etc., etc. With in-between settings, I avoid that annoyance. You don't use pressure cookers? Then maybe having in-between steps won't matter to you. This is just one example of how cooking styles can differ and how more settings can matter to one cook and not to another. Much fuss is sometimes made about the supposedly infinite adjustablity of gas burners. As a practical matter, though, we mostly try to get the burner to the same relatively few settings. Searing is pretty much searing, isn't it? If you deep fat fry, how often would you care if if the oil were at 352° instead of 350°? But maybe somebody is working with sugar syrups where, say, it might matter if a syrup is at 325° and not 360° and then maybe it matters if the induction burner only has ten settings. That said, the subject of induction power settings and controls can be more complicated than just the number of settings. The need for finding "in-between" steps for induction cooking can reflect two different aspects of ways that manufacturers design induction burner controls. One consideration is the power cycling that all induction burners use for settings of less than full power. A technical term for this is "pulse width modulation. or "PWM." It is the same kind of thing a microwave does for low heat levels---momentary pulses of power that average out at a particular heat level. With most PICs as well as some brands of induction cooktops and ranges, the PWM is pretty crude. I've seen this somewhere described as firing up the burner for a second or two of omigosh hot and then switching totally off for three or four seconds. While these pulses average out at a certain heat level the timing can be problematic for, say, the srambled eggs that Amy mentioned at the outset. Combine that kind of "low frequency" PWM with the crude power controls found on many PICs, and you could have a reason that Amy would find herself wanting steps in-between power level "1" and "2" for scambling eggs. Some full size induction ranges and cooktops work this way. I noticed a lot of pulsing at the low heat settings on the Maytag induction range I saw demoed several years ago when I was stove shopping. From past threads on PWM, I gather than Whirlpool's induction ranges and cooktops (which include Maytag and Kitchenaid brands) have used crude PWM. For searching out past threads here on this subject try a search strings like "induction + pulsing + gardenweb" and "induction + cycling + gardenweb." A few of the expensive PICs (Cooktek, Garland, Vollrath) and many full size ranges and cooktops use much higher frequency PWM. Instead switching on and off for a second or more at time, the power switches on and off many times per second. The higher frequency of switching yields much finer power control that more closely approximates a steady heat level. The other design aspect that can lead to wanting "in-between" settings is in how the engineers program the electronic controllers to space the power settings on the appliance you are using --- that's the kind of logarithmic curve I thnk Amy may been thinking about when she posed her question in the original post. . For manufacturers, the least costly controls use simple linear spacing. Setting "1" would use the PWM to average 10% power, setting "2" would be 20%, etc. Even with a high quality PWM, though, 9 or 10 linear settings may be too crude, A thing most induction users discover pretty quickly is that they do most of their cooking in the low to medium range settings. The highest setting can be used for boiling. One or two medium high settings takes care of high heat applications like searing. There seem to be three strategies for induction manufacturers to address the crudeness. One is to add half-steps between the numbered power settings. The other is to program the stove's controllers to put more steps in the low to medium range and fewer in the high ranges. The third strategey combines the first two. Without using the particular induction stove or cooktop, it can be hard to find out whether the particular unit was designed to use one or the other or some combination of them. In my own somewhat limited experience, it seems that the GE induction appliances and Electrolux's Frigidaire/Kenmore ranges seemed to use a modified-half step approach with some concentration of steps but also using half steps for finer control. The Electrolux-branded models use a slightly different approach with quarter-steps at the lower power ends and fewer steps at the high end. Miele cooktops seem to use a similar kind of mix with the option of switching on more steps. I'm not sure how BSH (which includes Bosch) handles this except that their induction appliances manuals show that half-steps are available. The Samsung freeestanding induction ranges seemed to follow the GE model (19 half steps). The reports about Samsung's ten-step "Chef Collection" model seem to conflict, some seeming to say that stepping is linear, some hinting that the settings may be skewed to the lower end. There is a yet another strategy which is the near infinite stepping of of potentiometer-like controls. These control systems seem to be very expensive so, AFAIK, they are used only for the commercial Garland/Manitowiac PICS and maybe the new Miele induction range have this. I say "maybe" for the Miele because there is nothing about it in the product literature and the display shows only whole-number settings, but a couple of posters here -- livinginseattle is the name I recall -- have reported finding that the knobs can be turned to provide fine gradations of "in-between" settings. Some folks would find that ideal. Then the question becomes: how much are you willing to spend for the "ideal" (and are there other design compromises that have to accept in order to get that ideal function for the burners?)